Attack of the 50 Ft. Women: From man-made mess to a better future – the truth about global inequality and how to unleash female potential. Catherine Mayer

opposes her own coalition’s agreement to expand the numbers of Syrian refugees it accepts.

      That women rise in such parties is a reflection of the fractious nature of such groups – remember: crises create room for movement – but the hard right has also got wise to the way a female face can lend an air of friendly modernity to their movements. They draw inspiration from a prominent role model. In 2011 Marine Le Pen took control of France’s Front National from its founder, her father Jean-Marie, and four years later oversaw his expulsion from the party after he downplayed the Holocaust as ‘a detail of history’. Under her stewardship the party has flourished, successfully expanding its reach to voters who shied away from its original incarnation. Her slicker, friendlier Front National sublimates its racism into messaging linking immigration to Islamism and an increased threat of terrorism. Regional elections in 2015 saw it come first in the opening round of voting with 28 per cent. She and her niece Marion Maréchal-Le Pen both won more than 40 per cent in their contests. For a time, it looked as if Le Pen might beat that score in her 2017 race for the Élysée Palace. She trounced traditional conservatives and old-style leftists in the first round, but lost out in the second to the only candidate who could also present himself as a political outsider, Emmanuel Macron, leader of En Marche!, a party he’d founded only a year earlier.

      Le Pen reinforces the warning against expecting of female leaders a more compassionate politics. Yet she also illustrates strong arguments for prising open political clubs to admit more women. For one thing, traditional politics has been weakened precisely because it operates clubs. If mainstream parties had kept closer touch with voters, they might have done a better job of answering the real concerns of those voters. Instead they’ve created space for demagogues to masquerade as truth-tellers and champions of the working man (if more rarely of the working woman).